With KDE 4.10 the file indexer has undergone some major changes which made it pretty usable so I decided to switch it on again. It turned out that the first stage indexing works exceptionally well. It indexed about 60,000 files in my home directory in the blink of an eye.

Unfortunately, I had to realize that the second level indexing does not work so well. I remember Virtuoso often eating up all my CPU in the past. Now Virtuoso keeps quiet, but nepomukindexer let's my workstation fly. It only starts indexing when my PC is idle, but for bigger files it keeps the CPU busy at a level of 100%, which is a pretty bad thing. There is already a Bug report about nepomukindexer consuming too much CPU time on larger files, but I didn't want to wait for a fix.

Long story short: I thought of ways to automatically limit the CPU usage of certain processes (not necessarily only Nepomuk).

This article is part of the 2010 Advent calendar series “24 Short Linux Hints”. This series focuses on little (and sometimes longer) tricks, tips and hints to solve common problems and to really improve your workflow.

Since Adobe has introduced Flash, there have always been major and minor problems with that on all platforms, especially on Linux. One problem I often had to deal with is a focus stealing bug with Kwin, KDE's window manager.

Gnome and KDE come more and more together but there are still some differences which sometimes might lead to incompatibilities between these two large desktop environments. Whereas you have relatively few problems with KDE applications on Gnome there are far more problems when using Gnome applications on KDE even though there are some compatibility engines.
In this Howto Blog post I'll show you a way to converge GTK and Qt as much as possible from the perspective of a KDE system.